What programs do you load after a clean Windows install?

Posted Nov 16th 2007 3:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Audio, Internet, Security, Utilities, Video , Windows, Office, Productivity, Commercial, Freeware, Ask DLS

Here at Download Squad HQ, we install and uninstall a lot of applications, tweak a lot of settings, and do a whole bunch of other things that generally makes Windows unhappy with us.

When I brought home my shiny new laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium earlier this year, I didn't know how lucky I was. My new PC shut down when I asked it to, slept when I closed the lid, and didn't cause glitches every time I started playing audio.

After spending some time pulling my hair out trying to get to the bottom of things, I figured the easiest way to solve some of my problems would be just to do a clean install of Windows. While programs like CCleaner are great for dusting the cobwebs of your windows registry, nothing works as well as reformatting the hard drive.

Of course, this was also an excellent opportunity to make sure I have a good backup of all my important data files, and to download and install just the applications that are most important to me in daily life. So after the jump is a list of the applications I started loading on my PC after restoring Windows. We'd love to know what programs you can't live without and what are the first things you load on a new PC?

Security applications

• AVG Free (anti-virus)
• Windows Defender (anti-spyware)

Internet applications

• Firefox (web browser)
  
• Filezilla (FTP client)
  
• Opera (web browser)
  
• Pidgin (chat client)
• Skype (VoIP)

Graphics and video applications

• Irfanview (image viewer/editor)
• Media Player Classic (movie player)
• Quicktime Alternative
  
• RealAlternative
• AllCapture (screencasting application)

Office applications

• OpenOffice.org (office suite)
  
• AbiWord (A great light-weight word processor for when you don't need all of OpenOffice.org 's features)
• Microsoft Outlook (mostly for synchronizing data with my Windows Mobile PDA)
• Windows Mobile Device Center (for syncing with my PDA)

Audio applications

• Audacity (audio editor)
  
• Cool Edit 2000 (yeah, I know, old school, but I've had a licensed copy lying around for years)
• Reaper (audio editor)
  
• Winamp (no, really)
• Juice (podcast aggregator)
• WinLAME (audio compression utility)
• Levelator (excellent tool for making your audio recordings sound good)

Utilities

• Sandboxie (lets you install applications in an isolated environment)
• 7-Zip (compression utility)
• Absolute Uninstaller (alternative to Windows uninstaller
• doPDF (install a virtual printer that lets you print any document as a PDF)